The Choice of Cloud Management Platform

How to Choose a Cloud Management Platform

As more and more companies build internal private clouds or enter the service provider market with public clouds, the more they will need the right set of tools to successfully build, manage and scale their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platform. However – choosing the right technology stack can be a difficult decision. There are several aspects that should be considered, such as planning for future growth and demand, team size, budget, project timeframe, previous experience, available hardware and the underlying infrastructure already in place. In this article, we will focus on the platforms that enable you to provision IaaS […]

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Customizing new CloudStack UI - Cover

Customising the CloudStack UI

A lot of work has gone into the CloudStack UI recently, and it is now a modern, role-based UI that not only gives a fresh look to CloudStack but also makes development and customisation much easier. In this blog, I provide guidance on how to customise the UI, and have classified customisation into two categories – basic and advanced. Basic Customisations Users can customise the UI by means of this configuration file: /etc/cloudstack/management/config.json to modify theme, logos, etc. as required. These changes can be made while the CloudStack management server is running, and the changes can be seen immediately with […]

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Apache CloudStack on RaspberryPi4

Apache CloudStack on RaspberryPi4 with KVM

IoTs have gained interest over recent times. In this article, Rohit Yadav, Principal Engineer at ShapeBlue, explores and shares his personal experience of setting up an Apache CloudStack based IaaS cloud on Raspberry Pi4, a popular single-board ARM64 IoT computer that can run GNU/Linux kernel with KVM. The article presents the use case of Apache CloudStack on RaspberryPi4 with Ubuntu 20.04 and KVM. CloudStack support for ARM64/RaspberryPi4 is available from version 4.13.1.0+. This guide uses a custom CloudStack 4.16 repository that was created and tested specifically against the new RaspberryPi4 and Ubuntu 20.04 arm64 to set up an IaaS cloud […]

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Shared Networks - How to specify VR - CloudStack

Specify VR IP in Shared Networks | CloudStack Feature First Look

If you are a system engineer managing shared networks and deploying virtual machines with CloudStack, you should be aware that currently there is no option to assign a specific IP address for the Virtual Router. The router is assigned the first free IP address. For many engineers, this might be annoying, as you are not able to make the selection by yourself. Moreover, you would prefer to hold the inventory under control and select the IP address to be assigned by yourself. In this article, we present a new feature in CloudStack, which make the management of shared networks easier. […]

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Apache CloudStack and Ceph part 3

Ceph and CloudStack – Part 3

Introduction In the previous two parts of this article series, we have covered the complete Ceph installation process and implemented Ceph as an additional Primary Storage in CloudStack. In this final part, I will show you some examples of working with RBD images, and will cover some Ceph specifics, both in general and related to the CloudStack. RBD image manipulations In case you need to do some low-level client support, you can even try to mount that image as the local disk on any KVM (or Ceph) node. For this purpose, we use a tool, conveniently named, “rbd”, which is […]

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Troubleshooting Web Application Automation | Cloudstack

Troubleshooting CloudStack Virtual Routers

Cloudstack’s multi-tenant virtualised networking model is one of its strongest features. Abstracting complex networking concepts and allowing simple UI/API configuration of networks is something loved by users of Cloudstack clouds. But, as an operator/administrator of a Cloudstack cloud you’ll almost certainly have had to troubleshoot network  problems  – and that means troubleshooting CloudStack’s Virtual Routers (VRs) . As Roy says in the picture , turning it off and on again can often resolve issues with a VR (or restarting a VR in Cloudstack language). But if that doesn’t work, administrators need to troubleshoot the VR. In this article, I will […]

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Apache CloudStack and Ceph part 2

Ceph and CloudStack – Part 2

In the previous article we covered some basics around Ceph and deployed a working Ceph cluster. In this article, we are going to finish the Ceph configuration needed for CloudStack and add it as a new Primary Storage pool. We are also going to deploy Ceph volumes via CloudStack and examine them. Finally, in part 3 (to be published soon), I will show you some examples of working with RBD images and will cover some Ceph specifics, both in general and related to the CloudStack. Before proceeding with the actual work, let me first mention that CloudStack supports Ceph with […]

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Apache CloudStack and Ceph part 1

Ceph and CloudStack – Part 1

As well as NFS and various block storage solutions for Primary Storage, CloudStack has supported Ceph with KVM for a number of years now. Thanks to some great Ceph users in the community lots of previously missing CloudStack storage features have been implemented for Ceph (and lots of bugs squashed), making it the perfect choice for CloudStack if you are looking for easy scaling of storage and decent performance. In this and my next article, I am going to cover all steps needed to actually install a Ceph cluster from scratch, and subsequently add it to CloudStack. In this article I […]

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CloudMonkey HTTPS lock | CloudStack

Securing CloudStack 4.11 with HTTPS/TLS

Apache CloudStack is generally considered secure out of the box, however it does have the capability of protecting both system VM traffic as well as management traffic with TLS certificates. Prior to version 4.11 CloudStack used Tomcat as the web server and servlet container. With 4.11 this has been changed to embedded Jetty web server and servlet container that makes CloudStack more secure and independent of distribution provided Tomcat version which could be prone to security issues. This changes the management server’s TLS configuration. In this blog post we’ll go through how to implement native TLS to protect both the system […]

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Funcional Test - Positive Icon | Integration Testing within CloudStack - Marvin

Integration Testing within CloudStack – Marvin

Integration testing – What it is and why SDLC needs it. What is Integration testing? This is a type of testing where multiple components are combined and tested working together. There are different aspects of integration testing depending on the project and component scale, but usually it comes down to validating that different modules can work together and / or independently. This type of testing drives one out of the tunnel vision one could develop while working on a complex task and gives feedback how the work integrates with rest of the system. Integration testing in CloudStack Integration testing in […]

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